"Overleaf represents freedom of creation, sharing, and novelty." – Maria Luiza Linhares Dantas Maria recently completed her Masters degree in Astrophysics at the University of Sao Paulo, and we're delighted to welcome her as a new Overleaf Advisor! In this short interview she explains why she applied to be an Advisor and how she's been using Overleaf in her recent work.

From the Monday to Thursday evening, 23rd-26th May 2016, the Pint of Science festival will be coming to Number 90 Bar & Restaurant in Hackney Wick in the form of the Creative Reactions event sponsored by Overleaf. Becky Allen, Nuclei, Dreamscapes

Vel Gayevskiy, creator of LaTeXTemplates.com, meets Overleaf founders John and John in London. On the 31st July we had the pleasure of going for lunch with Vel Gayevskiy, creator of LaTeXTemplates.com, who was visiting the UK for a couple of weeks following a Bioinformatics workshop. We've known Vel for a number of years and have exchanged many emails but never met in person before this summer! We took this opportunity to ask Vel a few questions about his research, why he decided to create a site for LaTeX templates, and what his plans are for the future.

How often do we find the illustrations we need for our presentations or posters? It gets even worse when we need an illustration for a paper, right? Mind the Graph aimes to help scientists in communicating their findings in a simple, beautiful and professional way. We want to help make your science less complicated and bring it closer to your audience!

I'm a PhD student and recently had to write a couple of papers for a conference. Despite emailing the pdfs for review to my supervisors, after submitting things still got missed. I'm hoping writeLaTeX will enable a more collaborative means to write documents and ensure the latest version is worked upon. I use pdf_tex files for my graphs, and since the writeLaTeX team added support so I could use them in my documents here, I wanted to share how this style of graph is achieved so others can produce beautiful vector based graphics.

Your affiliated university and academic society templates are now easily accessible from your projects dashboard! Simply click the 'New Project' button on your dashboard and the featured templates from your university or society's institutional license are right at the top to help you quickly get started.

(click the gif to view a bigger version) Did you know that you can also revert specific changes ('chunks') to the previous version – perhaps to reject some changes made by a co-author, or to reverse a recent erroneous line of code, but accepting other edits?

I am happy to write about our successful ongoing collaboration with Stanford University Libraries! Earlier this year, in February, I attended Stanford’s Gear Up for research day. It was fun speaking with students, researchers, faculty and staff interested in increasing productivity and quality related to collaborative scientific authoring. The feedback was excellent – students and faculty were genuinely happy that Stanford was providing free Overleaf Pro accounts to all students and faculty. Collaboration is on the rise, and having an innovative collaborative authoring tool received high praise! You can view my lightning talk slides by clicking here.

Having been loudly singing the praises of Overleaf for years now, first as a PhD student and then as an ambassador and lecturer, I'm amazed that there are still a good proportion of LaTeX users who haven't heard of it. I was therefore eager to set up a booth at the Australian and NZ Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference, held in Australia's capital city, Canberra, from February 7-11 2016 to spread the word. This was especially the case since Overleaf had generously agreed to sponsor the Conference, specifically the production of the conference handbook which was compiled in Overleaf.

After Juan got in touch with us as part of the Overleaf Campus Challenge 2016, we invited him to tell us a little more about his work and his collaborations. Here's what he had to say... My colleague and friend Miguel-Ángel Sicilia and I were working together on a new book, and he said to me: "We will be continually updating this work and the other must see immediately the update; perhaps we could use Overleaf to make the collaboration easy." I remember that I said: “to use, what?” And now I use Overleaf for all my academic work! – Professor Juan Cuadrado

Congratulations and thanks to Dr. Arindam Basu and the Research Committee of the College of Education, Health, and Human Development CoEHHD for organizing an interactive Overleaf overview presentation at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch in New Zealand. As a champion of collaborative research, Arin’s aim for this workshop was to introduce and encourage the use of Overleaf as a collaborative writing tool among students and academic faculty members. In addition, Arin is creating some basic tutorials that will be available soon in Overleaf’s help section of the website. We value Arin’s continued use, support, and promotion of Overleaf. As a result, Overleaf is delighted to name Arin Basu as Advisor of the Month for November, 2015. Thank you Arin!